Abstract

Any historical reflection of the fête (or feast) must depart from the observation of its actual conditions of subsistence, in order to understand the veritable “festive explosion” that has marked historical production this last decade. Although it is not specifically historical, the emergence of the fête (and in particular of the ancient feast) as a preferential object of study, leads one in effect to wonder about the reasons that have brought about that, in a given moment, an entire scientific class, in this case the French historians, has felt attracted by a theme which until then was treated only in folklorist collections. Seemingly, three reasons, that pertain as much to the recognized function of the historical discipline as to its internal evolution, may be cited. It is clear, above all, that the increased research into the ancient feast constitutes a sort of compensation, as a means of understanding, to the disappearing system of civilization in which the fête had, or rather, is considered as having had, a central role. The historical analysis is therefore charged to explain, in its idiom and with its technique, the nostalgia evoked by a present which has eliminated the fête defined as an act of community participation. On these grounds it then becomes possible to rediscover one of the major functions assigned—implicitly or explicitly—to history today: to restore to the sphere of knowledge a vanished world of which contemporary society feels the heritage, but as an unfaithful heir. That the operation of understanding is difficult to separate from the fabrication of an imaginary past collectively desired, is, in the end, insignificant, unless it is meant to underline those themes that, by being the most neglected by our present age, become the most symptomatic of a world we have lost. The fête, vidently, is one of these.